Embodiments of the present invention are directed to methods and systems that enable a digital wallet identifier to be present in communications associated with transaction data of transactions that are facilitated by a digital wallet provider.
Digital wallets are becoming increasingly popular for conducting various types of transactions. A digital wallet can store financial account information or other information associated with a user, for example, information associated with credit cards, debit cards, coupons, rewards, receipts, concert tickets, and the like. A digital wallet may be linked to a user's payment credentials as well as personal information. The wallet data may reside on a communication device such as a user's mobile device or a personal computer, on a server of a wallet provider or other cloud storage, and may be obtained by and transferred to a merchant from a user's communication device. This reduces the need to enter payment credentials or present a physical card each time a payment transaction is conducted.
Digital wallets may be associated with merchants, mobile network operators, financial institutions such as banks, or third party vendors. A transaction may be initiated from the communication device of a user using one of many digital wallets associated with the user's communication device. A problem associated with such transactions is that there may be no mechanism available to identify a digital wallet provider associated with the transaction by downstream entities in a typical transaction flow, for example, by a merchant or an acquirer associated with the merchant. As a result, these downstream entities may not be capable of obtaining sufficient data relating to transactions facilitated by digital wallet providers. For instance, a merchant and its associated acquirer may not be capable of readily ascertaining which digital wallet providers are favored by users when transacting at the particular merchant.
Further, in some digital wallet implementations, a transaction may be initiated by providing payment credentials in the form of a payment token instead of providing conventional account information such as a Primary Account Number (PAN), a card expiry date and a Card Verification Value (CVV) to a merchant. The payment token may be transmitted to a payment processing network capable of using the payment token to identify the account information and route the transaction to the appropriate issuing institution. This mechanism may reduce security risks, for example, in that a user's sensitive payment credentials may remain hidden from merchants.
In some cases, a user may, for example, generate payment tokens using more than one communication device. As a result, one payment account may be represented by a plurality of different payment tokens, and entities such as merchants and acquirers may not have sufficient information to identify the different tokens as being associated with a single payment account or user. Tracing these different tokens to a payment account or user may be desirable, for instance, to allocate benefits or rewards to a user regardless of whether the user employed different payment tokens to transact.
Embodiments of the invention aim to address these and other problems, individually and collectively.